2020Q3 Reports: Professional Conduct Committee notes on virtual conference

ACL Professional Conduct Committee Report on Virtual Conference Organization

The change to the virtual format brought challenges at all levels of conference organization. Based on our experience with ACL 2020, we have the following recommendations:

1. Involve the PCC early in discussions of conference format. It was unclear to us until June 24 that there would be one Q&A session per paper and no equivalent to session chairs, leaving open the possibility of an author having to manage a harassing or otherwise disruptive participant one-on-one and without assistance. This left us only four workdays in which to come up with some sort of plan that could be communicated to authors in their instructions.
2. Insist on customer support from the vendors in the contract. We had a lot of questions about specific Zoom settings, but (according to the virtual infrastructure chairs), Zoom was not responsive. Somehow this meant that the SlidesLive representative kept being approached with these questions and purporting to answer them even though he had zero knowledge of Zoom functionality.
3. Make the transparent-name policy more prominent in the online venue/registration process (see below for more info).
4. Impress upon authors, and everyone else, that Zoom links must not be made public in any venue outside the perimeter of the virtual conference (e.g., not on Twitter or personal blogs), as there are trolls who comb social media for such links in order to invade and disrupt meetings. (Authors can instead publish a link to their paper in the ACL Anthology, which will also subsequently include the video of their talk.)
5. Remind participants that the public chat channels are for polite conference-related discussions only, and must not be used for personal remarks or personal arguments.
6. It is critical that all associated events (workshops, sponsored socials, etc) use uniform software with uniform settings so that the anti-harassment and anti-disruption procedures can be implemented.

We ended up with the following procedures:

1. Authors and other Zoom room hosts were instructed that they could
   1. Mute individual participants and change the setting to one where individual participants cannot unmute themselves;
   2. Move disruptive participants to a waiting room;
   3. Remove disruptive participants all together from that Zoom session.
2. Authors could do this themselves, or ask for assistance in the #incidents channel where conference volunteers, set up with appropriate Zoom permissions (co-host on each of the rooms, I believe) were on-call to come in and take these actions should authors not be prepared to do so.
3. We asked that any Zoom room hosts or volunteers that invoked any of these actions report the incident to the PCC via a Microsoft form. We have received one such report, relating to an incident where an outside party Zoom-bombed one session.
4. We asked that all participants ensure that their name as it appeared in Zoom and RocketChat be transparently relatable to the name with which they registered for ACL (to avoid anonymous harassment or impersonation of other attendees).
5. We set up a channel where members of the PCC were available for private consultation, and we set up a rota of PCC members to ensure that someone would be on duty at all times during the live parts of the conference.

These procedures were documented in the PDFs shared with authors, volunteers, and other hosts.